They are going to get higher.  But why?  Many factors affect the price of crude oil, and ultimately gasoline.  One major influence is the economy.  The US economy is weak (understatement of the year right?) and because of this weakness, and the dollar losing ground, people invest in crude oil as a “hedge”.  When the dollar falls, things like crude oil, gold, silver, etc.  become much more valuable.  Oil prices make up about 80% of the price of a gallon of gasoline, and those prices have increased about 20% because investors  are funneling money into commodities.

Believe it or not, the refineries are struggling to make any money at all.  They get blamed sometimes for the prices, but as I have stated above, the prices are influenced by investors, and the companies that own the actual oil.  The refiners are making about 6 dollars from every barrel of oil they process, when about a year ago they were making 35+ dollars per barrel.  They currently are only operating at about 85%, but I ask you where is their incentive to increase throughput when they can’t turn a profit.  So who is making money? BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, etc.  Thats where most of the profits go, and that is who is stuffing their proverbial pockets full of our hard earned money.

You can make your situation better by using a proper function and variable naming convention.  Proper naming conventions tend to be language specific at least, but there are some general rules of thumb.  ConvertToCat is a much better function name than convcat for example.  All caps are typically reserved for macros / global variables.  Leading a function with _ is generally reserved for special cases, (like constructors in C#.NET).  My point is that many developers tend to be lazy and abbreviate way too often.

Even with the best naming standards, there is still a need for comments.  I was taught in my CS courses to comment every function start and end, arguments, and return values.  Proper commenting and standards are especially important if you ever plan to work with other developers on a project.  It is better to get in the habit of doing things in the proper way, than to pay the price of being lazy later.  I can tell you from experience that you do not want to spend half a day trying to figure out what some function did and why you are using it in a certain way.